Urban Crop Solutions and Rudi Pauwels establish research center in Spain

Urban Crop Solutions (UCS) and Dr Rudi Pauwels will set up a research center on indoor farming applications in southern Spain. Research at the center will focus on the impact of climate change on crops in southern Europe, while working on optimizing the nutrient content. For UCS, this new research center complements its existing research center in Belgium. Pauwels will also advise UCS on its plant molecular farming activities.  

Urban Crop Solutions has been active in researching growing plants without sunlight, in its own designed and engineered indoor farms since 2014 – many of which have been commissioned and installed globally. The company's past research activities at its headquarters in Belgium have already led to several new applications enabled by its controlled environment farming techniques.

With Dr Rudi Pauwels – who is world-renowned for his development of the world's most widely used and successful AIDS inhibitors, and founder of several successful biotech companies – UCS will build a new research center near Málaga in southern Spain. This research center will work on the challenges brought about by global warming in southern European regions. In these regions, there is an opportunity and a need to rethink traditional farming practices, considering the increasing water shortages, and the advantages offered by modern agriculture. With consideration to the calls that, in the future, farms should focus more on the production of the most nutritious crops, UCS and Dr Rudi Pauwels have determined their joint mission as one that optimizes the nutrient content of crops, through their controlled environment agriculture techniques. It is envisaged that the research center will be operational by early 2023. The studies will be led by Pauwels and Dr Oscar Navarrete, Chief Plant Scientist at Urban Crop Solutions.    

"With this initiative, I reconnect with the centuries-long agricultural tradition in my family," explained Pauwels. "It was my grandfather and especially my father, a horticultural engineer, who passed onto me a lot of knowledge, and passion for this field in my childhood years. Furthermore, I believe very strongly in plant molecular farming or plant-based production. UCS's indoor farming techniques are highly important for the use of plants as an alternative and efficient carrier, for the production of molecules of interest for various pharmaceutical products such as vaccines."

"We are very honored that a captain of the industry of Dr Rudi Pauwels’ caliber wants to work with us to turn the possibilities of indoor farming into concrete realizations. This proves that we have built up a lot of expertise over the past eight years and that we have installed the right business model," added Frederic Bulcaen, Chairman & Co-Founder of Urban Crop Solutions.

"Whereas in the early years, the focus of our company was exclusively on selling installations for traditional commercial food production, we are convinced that we can accelerate our growth by focusing more on installations for plant molecular farming."